Hoffmann Martina, Schmidt Alexander, Ploner Christoph J
Berlin Center for Musicians' Medicine, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin, Kurt-Singer-Institute for Music Physiology and Musicians' Health, Berlin, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2022 Oct 24;13:973164. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.973164. eCollection 2022.
Music can act as a mnemonic device that can elicit multiple memories. How musical and non-musical information integrate into complex cross-modal memory representations has however rarely been investigated. Here, we studied the ability of human subjects to associate visual objects with melodies. Musical laypersons and professional musicians performed an associative inference task that tested the ability to form and memorize paired associations between objects and melodies ("direct trials") and to integrate these pairs into more complex representations where melodies are linked with two objects across trials ("indirect trials"). We further investigated whether and how musical expertise modulates these two processes. We analyzed accuracy and reaction times (RTs) of direct and indirect trials in both groups. We reasoned that the musical and cross-modal memory demands of musicianship might modulate performance in the task and might thus reveal mechanisms that underlie the association and integration of visual information with musical information. Although musicians showed a higher overall memory accuracy, non-musicians' accuracy was well above chance level in both trial types, thus indicating a significant ability to associate and integrate musical with visual information even in musically untrained subjects. However, non-musicians showed shorter RTs in indirect compared to direct trials, whereas the reverse pattern was found in musicians. Moreover, accuracy of direct and indirect trials correlated significantly in musicians but not in non-musicians. Consistent with previous accounts of visual associative memory, we interpret these findings as suggestive of at least two complimentary mechanisms that contribute to visual-melodic memory integration. (I) A default mechanism that mainly operates at encoding of complex visual-melodic associations and that works with surprising efficacy even in musically untrained subjects. (II) A retrieval-based mechanism that critically depends on an expert ability to maintain and discriminate visual-melodic associations across extended memory delays. Future studies may investigate how these mechanisms contribute to the everyday experience of music-evoked memories.
音乐可以作为一种能唤起多种记忆的记忆辅助工具。然而，音乐信息与非音乐信息如何整合为复杂的跨模态记忆表征却鲜有研究。在此，我们研究了人类受试者将视觉对象与旋律建立关联的能力。音乐外行和专业音乐家都进行了一项联想推理任务，该任务测试了形成并记忆对象与旋律之间配对关联的能力（“直接试验”），以及将这些配对整合为更复杂表征的能力，即在不同试验中旋律与两个对象相联系（“间接试验”）。我们进一步研究了音乐专业知识是否以及如何调节这两个过程。我们分析了两组在直接和间接试验中的准确性和反应时间（RTs）。我们推断，音乐才能所涉及的音乐和跨模态记忆需求可能会调节任务中的表现，从而揭示视觉信息与音乐信息关联和整合背后的机制。尽管音乐家总体记忆准确性更高，但在两种试验类型中，非音乐家的准确性也远高于随机水平，这表明即使是未经音乐训练的受试者也具有将音乐与视觉信息关联和整合的显著能力。然而，与直接试验相比，非音乐家在间接试验中的反应时间更短，而在音乐家中则发现了相反的模式。此外，直接和间接试验的准确性在音乐家中显著相关，而在非音乐家中则不然。与之前关于视觉联想记忆的描述一致，我们将这些发现解释为至少有两种互补机制有助于视觉 - 旋律记忆整合。（I）一种默认机制，主要在复杂视觉 - 旋律关联的编码阶段起作用，即使在未经音乐训练的受试者中也能以惊人的效率发挥作用。（II）一种基于检索的机制，关键取决于专家在延长的记忆延迟期间维持和区分视觉 - 旋律关联的能力。未来的研究可以探讨这些机制如何促成音乐唤起记忆的日常体验。
